A Civilization Built on Sand

         The familiar metaphor that one should place the foundation of a house upon a rock rather than sand is usually used in reference to religions but it also applies to modern technology.  The, so called, civilized world of man began with the use of stone tools, weapons and building  materials, advanced with the addition of bronze implements and weapons, took another step into the age of iron and steel, and with the help of mortar and concrete, has brought us to our present state of solid roads and structures all carefully placed on solid foundations. Unfortunately we found a secondary use for sand that may be making our modern civilized world fragile in spite of it's apparent solidity.. 
     Silica, (sand), is the second most common element on Earth and we have used it as an abrasive, have turned it into glass, and combine it with many other elements to our advantage. Very recently we discovered another use for silica. By turning it into tiny chips we can use sand to store and process information, allowing us to create thinking self directed machines. The stuff we let our children play in and walk on next to ocean waves now has a memory, lands airplanes, directs factory robots, guides bombs, directs the flow of electricity to our factories, monitors our water distribution systems, provides vendors and wholesalers the tools that keep track of sales and inventory, is integral to Wall Street and every other world stock exchange and is central to our communications and navigation. We have replaced direct control of nearly every essential operation of our complex civilization with chips of sand and become dependent on their reliability. We have created a fragile interface between ourselves and the systems that sustain us. In just a few decades we have replaced a civilization built on rock and steel with human hands on the levers of control to a civilization built on sand susceptible to gamma ray bursts and computer virus.
     When sand shifts under the foundation of a building the building sinks and the foundation cracks but, with the exception of an earth quake, a sinking building seldom effects a neighboring building. Our new silica chip civilization however is networked into interlocking operations communicating with individuals and each other and a crack in one foundation quickly spreads. Some of this is accidental as was the case of the great power grid failure in 2002 and some is intentional as in the case of the Iranian nuclear development center computer crash in 2010. The most dangerous of these was the Iranian incident. Even though shielded and isolated from the Internet the security of the computer systems running the uranium enrichment program crashed when a powerful virus designed to interrupt program directives for complex machine operations was introduced internally by the insertion of a simple thumb drive. What makes this incident noteworthy is that the destructive virus escaped the secure facility and has since infected thousands of critical operations in many sectors.
     The implications of these incidents and many others should make it clear that our advanced technologically based civilization, dependent on traces for electron movements etched in silica chips and continuous communications, has moved the foundation of human survival onto soft ground.
Ironically, it may be the inherent uncertainty of the quantum world that moves us back to a rock solid foundation as quantum computing makes intrusions and errors nearly impossible.